So there was only guessing left, only learning as he went. Only holding tight to his daughter as she wept.
Chapter Five
18 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR) Waterdeep
The glaive slipped in Havilar’s grip, the blade turning aside as it hit the dummy. She stopped and patted her sweaty hands on her shirt. When she’d taken up her old weapon again, she’d felt the first faint stirrings of hope at its familiar weight. But after a long practice session, that hope felt as hard to hold onto as a greased string.
Lorcan’s sister might have given her back some measure of her previous strength, her mind might still know how to direct her arms and legs, her wrists and hips and feet. But her muscles hardly listened and all the time the devils had stolen from her had let her calluses fall away. The skin of her hands was soft as a newborn’s and every practiced chop and jab was accompanied by the screaming pain in her hands and the burst of blisters.
Havilar took up the weapon again, gritting her teeth.
In the back of her thoughts, Havilar was as frightened as she’d ever been, and wishing she’d gone with Mehen when he’d asked her to, instead of telling him to leave her be. She wished she’d stopped Brin by the portal and held him tight. She wished she could have just screamed at Farideh, and maybe let out some measure of this anger, this sense of betrayal. She wished she could curl up and cry for a bit.
But if Havilar knew she felt these things, they were buried deep behind a certainty that before anything could be made right, first she had to master the glaive again. Before anything could go back to being right, the one true thing about her life had to be so once more.
And to master the glaive, she had to keep drilling.
She aimed a chop at the dummy’s neck. The glaive broke out of her slippery grip and flipped back over her shoulder to clatter to the ground.
“Karshoj!” Havilar shrieked, stamping her feet. It was wrong, everything was wrong. She lashed out at the wooden dummy’s chest until the bones of her arms rattled and her breath came hard. She looked at her hands-not just sweat, but blood.
In the distance, the clock they called the Timehands chimed the hour. She counted the bells as she bent to retrieve the glaive. It had been three hours since she’d last noticed the time. No wonder she was so tired.
As she straightened, she saw him standing on the edge of the practice field, all garbed in fine clothes and carrying a battered wooden box.
“Brin.” She held the glaive close, as if she could hide behind it. “I hope you weren’t watching that.”
His mouth quirked into a smile she knew well, even under that stranger’s beard. “Only some of it,” he said. “Mehen said you were out here. He’s worried about you.”
“I’m going in.” She swallowed against the lump in her throat. “Just a moment.”
“I’m worried too.”
Havilar looked at her feet. What did that mean? He would have said, before. He would have told her what he was worried about and what made him say that-her sloppy jabs, her bleeding hands, the late hour, or maybe the fact she’d come back at all? He would have told her things were going to be all right, or if they weren’t, what they would do differently.
Everything was wrong.
“Thank you for keeping my glaive,” she said.
“Of course.” He held up the wooden box. “I thought you might-” He cleared his throat. “That is, these are your things. Yours and Farideh’s. From before.” She crossed the field and took it from him, balancing the glaive against her hip. “Besides, you know, the weapons.”
Havilar stared at the box, at once wanting to drop down on the ground and tear through it, and wanting to throw it away, so that it couldn’t taunt her. She settled for cradling it in her arms, wondering what was inside. What Brin had thought important enough to save. What Brin had been so eager to return.
“Are you married?” she blurted.
He laughed, maybe nervously. “No.”
Was that a stupid thing to ask? She didn’t know. It seemed like every scrap of confidence she’d earned and gathered and prized was gone. She couldn’t use her glaive, she couldn’t talk to Brin, she couldn’t do anything.
He looked so different and still so much like her Brin. She wanted so much to hold him tight again, to kiss him through that stupid beard. But he made no move to come any nearer to her. Too much had changed.
“Are you staying long?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No, I can’t. I probably shouldn’t have left Cormyr, only, well, I couldn’t not come.” He was quiet a moment, while she stared at the sand. “Havi, I’m really glad you’re alive.”
“I have to go,” she said. It was too much. She wasn’t going to be the silly girl who said all the wrong things, not with him. Glaive in hand, box on her hip, she hurried past him, tears rising in her eyes.
She passed the entrance to the cellar and grabbed one of the bottles of wine sitting there, waiting to be ordered. After all, she thought, heading up the stairs, it wasn’t as if she were a child. It wasn’t as if Mehen or anyone else could stop her.
She was nearly to her room, at the top of the stairs, when she passed the little library the Harpers kept. The doors were open and Farideh sat on the floor, several books open around her. Reading, Havilar thought, as if nothing were wrong.
Farideh looked up and in her expression was all the fear and contrition Havilar didn’t want to see. “Havi-”
“You were right,” Havilar said, shaking, she was so angry. “It didn’t last. It didn’t even get a chance, because you had to get in the way, thinking you’re the only one who knows how to fix a karshoji thing, and ruin my entire life just to stop something that you didn’t even stop! Are you happy?”
Tears brimmed her sister’s eyes, and Farideh looked away. “I’m sorry. Havi, I’m so-”
“Shut up,” Havilar said. “Shut up. I was on your side when they kicked you out of the village, I was on your side when you decided to go racing around Neverwinter, I was even on your side when you wanted to go down in that crypt and nearly got us both killed, but I am not on your side now, and I’m never going to be on your side again.”
Havilar didn’t wait for Farideh to respond-there wasn’t a thing she could say that Havilar wanted to hear. She turned on her heel and, toting her glaive and box and the bottle of wine, went up to her room.
Door shut firmly behind her, Havilar pulled the cork from the bottle with her teeth and considered the box thrown onto the bed. Give it to Farideh, she thought, make her sort it out. She took a heavy swig of the wine, flinching at its dryness. But she wasn’t going back out-not for better wine and not for Farideh. She drank more, enough to warm her belly, and sat on the bed, the box in her lap.
“It’s just a box,” she told herself.
It was emptier than she’d expected. A stack of yellowed chapbooks. A stylus. A bottle of ink, long dried up. Stiff strips of leather for tying her braids. Farideh’s little dagger, spotted with rust. A bright red feather she’d found and stuck in her braid for a day or two. Squares of cloth snipped off her old clothes-she rubbed a piece of her cloak between two fingers. It was softer than she’d remembered. She set them aside and found, pooled in the bottom, a chain of silver.
She drew it out-Farideh’s amulet of Selûne. The one that bound devils.
Havilar took another gulp of wine, squeezing the chain hard enough to hurt her palm. A single word-that’s all it would have taken and she could have stopped that Sairché. But Farideh wasn’t wearing the amulet then, because Lorcan had told her not to. Henish, Havilar thought, and drank more wine.